ALLNESS NOT ILLNESS

John Dorsey was a psychiatrist who was well loved and well respected by his students at Case Western Reserve Medical School. I came across his writings in a book about the Holocaust, where the author, Henry Krystal, cited John Dorsey as having had a major influence on his own work as a psychiatrist, particularly with patients who had been in the Holocaust. Krystal found that those patients often had somatic (physical problems) but not emotional problems, despite the fact that they had been through hell. He thought that the patients' physical symptoms were expressing the horrors they could not allow themselves to recognize emotionally. He spent his life helping such patients develop enough courage and internal confidence to begin to let themselves feel their hurt, anger, guilt, sadness and even joy. John Dorsey taught his students that all emotions were there for a good reason, and that by embracing our 'allness' we can avoid 'illness.' He writes that: "every emotion is made of nothing but love. Anger, or grief, or jealousy, or whatever painful emotion, is merely inhibited love struggling under stressful ordeal. Hate is hurt (hindered) love, deviltry is hurt (hindered) divinity, doubt is hurt (hindered) belief, fear is hurt (hindered) safely, guilt is hurt (hindered) innocence." So Dorsey taught his students to help their patients embrace each and every feeling, to sit with them and absorb their surroundings, especially their own inner world, their world of feelings, and to allow themselves to be whole, not compartmentalized, whole, real and not ill.